GRAY – Fiddlehead Center for the Arts and Sciences, the after-school educational center and charter school, is expanding its footprint in downtown Gray.

For seven years, the center has shared a 16,000-square-foot facility at 25 Shaker Road with health management company Patient Advocates LLC. But on May 1, Patient Advocates moved into a 10,000-square-foot building on the former Gobeil’s complex on Route 100 now operated by Walt Hebold and Ron Marcotte. The healthcare firm’s exodus has opened up 6,000 square feet of space inside the 25 Shaker Road facility.

This summer, Fiddlehead, which owns 25 Shaker Road and is comprised of two distinct non-profits – the Fiddlehead School of Arts and Science, and the Fiddlehead Arts and Science Center – will renovate the former Patient Advocates space. In its place, the center plans to install new classrooms and a “discovery zone,” according to Fiddlehead School of Arts and Science Executive Director, Jacinda Cotton-Castro.

“They needed more room, and so did we,” Cotton-Castro said. “So we’re ready to move in.”

Cotton-Castro said that the expansion will provide the necessary room for Fiddlehead’s public charter school, which was started in September, and has 45 students ranging from pre-K to second grade. This year, the first- and second-grade students are in a combined class, Cotton-Castro said. The expansion, she said, will allow for separate first- and second-grade classes, as well as a new third-grade school, and 35 new students, in total. In the coming years, the public charter is scheduled to expand up to the fifth-grade level, she said.

The expansion will also make room for a large “discovery zone,” which Cotton-Castro compared to local children’s museums.

“It’s allowing the center to create this real hands-on, minds-on mini-art and science exploration area,” she said. “So if you think of going to the Children’s Museum of Portland or the Bangor Discovery Museum – two great museums in the state of Maine – we’ll have a small interactive, hands-on area within that space over there that both the school kids and the after-school kids can access.”

Cotton-Castro said she is excited about the coming renovations.

“I grew up in Maine, and I wish this had been around,” she said. “Not many other places will have an interactive, hands-on thing available, plus the amazing after-school that we have.”

Fiddlehead staff members Jacinda Cotton-Castro, middle, Lisa Simonds, second from right, and Kimberly Allen, right, speak with students enrolled in the arts and science after-school program last week.